Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for NonfictionA Boston Globe Best Book of 2016A Washington Post Notable Book of 2016The Most Ambitious Book of 2016Carlos Lozada, Washington PostA Buzzfeed Best Nonfiction Book of 2016A Chicago Review of Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2016A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2016A Bustle Best Nonfiction Book of 2016

[An] engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America. The greatest service Kendi [provides] is the ruthless prosecution of American ideas about race for their tensions, contradiction and unintended consequences.Washington Post

A deep (and often disturbing) chronicling of how anti-black thinking has entrenched itself in the fabric of American society.The Atlantic

Stamped from the Beginning is a history of how racist ideas are built, and how they are built to last. Understanding this history is essential if we want to have any hope of progress. This book will forever change the way we think about race.Touré, MSNBC contributor

Young black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts. The unemployment rate for African Americans has been double that of whites for more than half a century. And yet Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first black president spelled doom for racist policies and racist beliefs. But weve seen what kind of president follows the first black president in America and it has never been clearer that racist thought is alive and wellit has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in his National Book Award-winning STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (a Nation Books hardcover and ebook; on-sale April 12, 2016), if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.

In this deeply researched, provocative narrative, Kendi offers a comprehensive history of anti-Black racist ideastheir origins in fifteenth-century Portugal, their arrival in England in the mid-sixteenth century, and their blossoming in the United States, where they became the founding principles of our nations institutions and guarantors of its power. Contrary to popular conceptions, these ideas did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Instead, they were devised and honed by some of the most brilliant minds of each era, men like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. In an effort to justify and rationalize deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and disparities, assimilationists and segregationists alike created, debated, popularized, and defended racist ideas in the modern era, dictating the discussion on race for four hundred years.

Kendi narrates this history through the lives of five major characters in American history: early Americas most prolific and influential intellectual, Puritan minister Cotton Mather; the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson; fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison; brilliant scholar and thinker W.E.B. Du Bois; and legendary anti-prison activist Angela Davis. Their rich and surprising stories offer a window into the debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists that have marked Black Americans for centuries.

As Kendi shows, racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, but they are also easily discredited. In shedding much-needed light on the long, dark history of racist ideas, Kendi offers us the tools we need to expose themand in the process, gives us reason to hope.

Ibram X. Kendi is an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Florida. He authored the award-winning book, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 19651972

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